


the weaver sings of love

by AgentStannerShipper



Category: Torchwood
Genre: and jack and ianto is only sort of implied, i dont know what this is, this is real abstract
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-18
Updated: 2018-05-18
Packaged: 2019-05-08 17:31:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14698998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AgentStannerShipper/pseuds/AgentStannerShipper
Summary: No matter the tense, the time, the statement remains the same. Torchwood is small, and small cannot see great when great fills the whole horizon.





	the weaver sings of love

**Author's Note:**

> This is me having abstract feelings and trying to put them into words. It's...not great. But it sort of captures the emotion I was feeling today when I was thinking about Torchwood.

The Torchwood team don’t notice. They never noticed. No matter the tense, the time, the statement remains the same. Torchwood is small, and small cannot see great when great fills the whole horizon.

Yvonne thought she could see it, built the whole of Torchwood One around finding the little things that no one else could pick up on, using them for her own devices. But London fell, London burned, and with it burned all the little half-glimpses that she thought, in her folly, were whole pictures.

Jack thought he saw it too, took the fractured pieces of a dying Torchwood Three and glued them back together into a lopsided puzzle that almost showed the picture on the box but was maybe better for its flaws. He took Cardiff with the last gusts of a fading storm, thinking himself above it, thinking his future-sight equated to the present, but really too tired to look for anything but his Doctor.

And the rest of Torchwood, the little soldiers that became friends that became family, they followed Jack’s lead. They each had their own focus, their own microscope that gave them a sliver of the image, but never enough to link the pieces. Tosh came close. Oh, clever Tosh, she came so very close so many times. But Tosh has only ever needed a little nudge, a little praise pointing her in the wrong direction, and she’ll take it, at least for awhile. She always bounces back, but like a game of racquetball, it’s not a problem, so long as you’re prepared for the return serve.

Time continually formed and reformed around them, and not a single person noticed.

Timelines were tricky things. That analogy of a crumpled-up paper was a good one, but it didn’t quite grasp the intricacy. String theory was a bit of a laugh, but it got the imagery right; finding strings was easy but retying the knots so that everything connected just so, that was the hard bit. It was doable, if you had the time, the patience to make things work, but not many had the power and the patience.

Torchwood was a tricky little series of knots, always tangling back on itself and refusing to unravel no matter which ends of the line was tugged. Constantly writing and rewriting the line on the crumpled piece of paper, never quite sure what happened or when or if or how. So many contradictions, so many changes. The script flipped so many times it might as well have been an acrobat, tumbling from one idea to the next, never still long enough to settle on a thought.

Jack on his own was a little conundrum, the most flexible fixed point in time that possibly ever existed. Or would ever exist. Past and present and future meant little for a man who was all but time itself. A vessel for it, at least, power poured into a chalice overflowing, seemingly endless. The cup would run dry, but only long after the pitcher stopped pouring. He shifted, eternally shifted, as unsettled as time itself, unable to keep in one place even when his physical form was confined to it. No, Jack’s mind was always casting about in the stars even when his feet were on the ground. Not enough space. Never enough space.

He couldn’t see beyond time, couldn’t pull the threads. He might have been able to feel them pulling around him though, cradled in their blanket, stitched into the fabric like an unbudging knot turned into a decorative piece by the patient weaver. He might have felt the way time stitched around him, but he could not stitch it himself.

So he didn’t notice the weaver’s hands.

The Doctor never touched Torchwood more than briefly. If they had, then they might have noticed the loom, might have gotten just a glimpse more than the others, always so in tune with time, singing the same harmony at a different octave, able to read the notes if not write the music themselves. The Doctor could play over the strings, make the most beautiful music out of it, and perhaps that was why they were so at odds with Jack, who felt the strings tighten each time they were plucked.

But the Doctor didn’t pluck the strings near Torchwood, only brushed over them, and so they did not notice any more than Jack or Yvonne did. If the composer was being fair, they would acknowledge that it was not just the Doctor, not just Torchwood, who could not play with time, but few people got so close. Few people ran their fingers over the pages, reached for the strings even though they could not grasp them. The weaver had a special liking for Torchwood, and for Jack in particular. Such a stubborn knot, such a discordant note that somehow made the whole melody just a tiny bit sweeter.

It was why they had given him a stopwatch, a little ticking notice, knotted in purple and red, nestled right alongside Jack’s golden glow in the fabric. Not always the same name, the same face, but always the same devotion, a little device, fashioned in the watchmaker’s many, many images, gears wound tight with the same steady, rhythmic love that the whole universe, time itself had for a fixed point, the snag on which everything rested. The stopwatch was a timer, counting out lifetimes in the way only lives could. It gave Jack a countdown, even if he couldn’t hear the numbers, creeping or sprinting – time was coy and never so simple as to do just one thing at once – towards something beyond.

And he would always be Jack, no matter the name he fled to or the face he took, because for the watchmaker/the composer/the weaver of time itself, Jack had been Jack when he’d most been himself and when the stopwatch had been closest to the creator’s own essence. A perfect chiming harmony.

Because time was ending and beginning and even fixed points must unravel. But an unraveled fixed point merely becomes one with the fabric it has been stitched into, and when Jack closes his eyes for the last time and melts, string suddenly slack and then no longer knotted, he does not open them again.

But an open eye is not needed. The cup melts, the last blazes of time too hot for the chalice to keep its shape, and when it drips over the edges of the fabric it falls into waiting hands that are not hands but galaxies and blankets and music staffs waiting to be filled.

The fixed point unravels and the weaver is there to catch it, and with the familiarity of someone finally waking to notice a loved one they haven’t seen in a day a night an eternity, they call each other by name.


End file.
